Polio / A Reflection

The Hartford Courant reports in a front page story on the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the Salk vaccine to combat polio. My wife, who was a small child in the late '40s, remembers complaining to her parents during the night about being unable to move her legs. Her panicked parents, fearing their child was the latest to be stricken with the scourge of polio, called the family doctor in an age when they made house calls. By the time he arrived, she was happily skipping around, her leg cramps gone.

The Salk vaccine came late for many people, including my brother Ralph, a football standout at Emory University, who was stricken at age 22 in 1952. He spent the last 50 years of his life a paraplegic, yet through it all became a psychiatrist, married and raised five children and built his own house. Others, such as those who spent decades prostrate in an iron lung to help them breathe, weren't so lucky.

"They are historical curiosities now, the March of Dimes posters of immaculately groomed children in leg braces and the photos of frightened children sealed in iron lungs.  Fifty years ago this week the world was told that a polio vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas Salk "was safe, effective and potent," and it was not long afterward that those once ubiquitous images began to fade. The introduction of Salk's vaccine is being celebrated this week as one of the great medical accomplishments of the 20th century. Salk's vaccine and a better one created by Dr. Albert Sabin a few years later freed generations of Americans from the horror of paralytic polio."

    Steve Goddard